How long can you live with breast cancer on bone?
When breast cancer spreads to the bone, it can be treated but cannot be cured. Treatment aims to control and slow down the spread of the cancer, relieve symptoms and give you the best quality of life for as long as possible. After a diagnosis of secondary breast cancer, many people want to know how long they’ve got to live.
Is there a cure for breast cancer in the bone?
Although it will not cure secondary breast cancer in the bone, occasionally surgery may be part of a treatment plan. Surgery is more likely if the area of cancer in the bone is very small, can be easily accessed by the surgeon, and there’s no other secondary breast cancer elsewhere in the body.
How long should you wait to have surgery for breast cancer?
All of the people had early stage (non-metastatic) breast cancer with surgery as their first treatment. They then looked at wait times to surgery and survival rates at five different intervals: a wait of less than 30 days, a wait time of 31 to 60 days, a wait time of 61 to 90 days, a wait time of 91 to 120 days, and a wait time of 121 to 180 days.
Can breast cancer metastasize to bones?
The bones are one of the most common sites of breast cancer metastases. When metastatic breast cancer spreads to the bones, it’s called bone metastases. Bone metastases are not bone cancers. Although the cancer is in the bones, it’s still breast cancer and is treated with breast cancer drugs, not bone cancer drugs. When can bone metastases occur?
How long can a breast cancer patient live without treatment?
Median survival time of the 250 patients followed to death was 2.7 years. Actuarial 5- and 10-year survival rates for these patients with untreated breast cancer was 18.4% and 3.6%, respectively. For the amalgamated 1,022 patients, median survival time was 2.3 years.
What happens if no treatment for breast cancer?
This study is the first to quantify the impact of patient refusal of surgery on the survival of breast cancer. It clearly demonstrates that women who refuse surgery have a doubled risk to die of breast cancer, regardless of personal factors, tumor characteristics, stage, and nonsurgical treatment.
How long can you live with breast cancer that has spread to the bones?
Some studies suggest that the average 1-year survival rate for people with metastatic bone cancer is 40–59%. However, the American Cancer Society states that people with distant breast cancer are 28% as likely to live for at least another 5 years as those without this condition.
What happens if bone cancer is not treated?
If left untreated, primary bone cancer can spread to other parts of the body. Primary bone cancer is also known as bone sarcoma. Secondary (metastatic) bone cancer means that the cancer started in another part of the body, such as the breast or lung, and has spread to the bones.
How long can you live with untreated metastatic breast cancer?
Between 20 and 30 percent of women with early stage breast cancer go on to develop metastatic disease. While treatable, metastatic breast cancer (MBC) cannot be cured. The five-year survival rate for stage 4 breast cancer is 22 percent; median survival is three years. Annually, the disease takes 40,000 lives.
Can breast cancer survive without chemo?
A federally funded study has found that many women with the most common type of early stage breast cancer likely do not need chemotherapy after surgery.
Does bone cancer spread fast?
But not all bone metastasis progresses rapidly. In some cases, it progresses more slowly and can be treated as a chronic condition that needs careful management. Bone metastasis may not be curable, but treatment may help people live longer and feel better.
Which bones does breast cancer spread to first?
More than half of people who develop stage IV breast cancer have bone metastasis. Although breast cancer can spread to any bone, the most common sites are the ribs, spine, pelvis, and long bones in the arms and legs.
What happens if breast cancer has spread to the bones?
Bone weakening and fracture Secondary breast cancer in the bone may mean the affected bones are weakened, which can increase the risk of a fracture. If a bone has fractured you may need surgery to try to repair the fracture. You may also be given drug treatment to stop this happening in the future.
How long can one live with bone cancer?
Though some people will die of bone cancer, many others will make a full recovery. The five-year relative survival rate for bone cancer is 66.8%. This means that 66.8% of people with bone cancer are still alive five years after their diagnosis.
What stage is cancer when it spreads to the bones?
Low-grade cancers (G1) tend to grow and spread more slowly than high-grade (G2 or G3) cancers. Grade 1 (G1) means the cancer looks much like normal bone tissue. Grade 2 (G2) means the cancer looks more abnormal. Grade 3 (G3) means the cancer looks very abnormal.
Is bone cancer fast or slow growing?
It is more common in people older than 40 years of age, and less than 5% of these cancers occur in people under 20 years of age. It may either grow rapidly and aggressively or grow slowly.
Talk to Your Cancer Care Team
Andrea Silber, MD, a breast oncologist at Yale Cancer Center-Smilow Cancer Hospital, takes a “shared decision-making” approach when it comes to cancer care. She goes over the good and bad of stopping treatment and covers all other choices. She leaves the final say up to the person with cancer.
Seek Palliative Care
This kind of supportive care aims to raise your quality of life for as long as possible. You can tap into it from the time of your diagnosis all the way through end-of-life care if you need it. And when you decide to stop treatment, “that just means increased support for symptoms or other elements that may be causing you distress,” Prsic says.
Other Ways to Maintain Your Quality of Life
Use telehealth. You should stay in touch with your doctor. But ask them if you can do that without leaving your house. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Silber offered home visits.
Focus on What Matters
You can’t control cancer, but you can control how you spend the time you have left. Dig in your garden, make plans for special events, or do things you’ve always wanted to do. If symptoms get in the way, tell your doctor.
Symptoms Point to Cancer's Spread
Bone metastasis may not have any symptoms. But often, you'll feel pain in your bones. The ache may come and go and first, often worsening at night and easing up when you're active. Eventually it can become more intense and flare during activity.
Tests Detect Tumors in Your Bones
Your doctor may check you for bone metastasis if you have these signs, or if you have certain risk factors, including larger tumors or later-stage cancer. Tools he or she may use to make the diagnosis include:
Treatment Often Involves Medications
If your doctor finds bone metastasis, you will most likely be treated with a type of medication called a bisphosphonate. This drug is given through an intravenous (IV) line.
Take Steps to Prevent Falls and Fractures
When your bones are weakened by cancer, minor accidents can be serious. Talk with your doctor about the best way to prevent falls and reduce your risk of fractures. Your strategy should include:
Key Takeaways
Breast cancer can spread to other parts of the body. When it spreads to the bones, it's called bone metastasis.
Types of bone metastases
Normally your bones are constantly changing. New bone tissue is being formed and old bone tissue is breaking down into minerals that circulate in your blood. This process is called remodeling.
Bone-targeting treatment
Specific drugs that target bones are an important part of therapy and a developing research area.
New developments
Ask your doctors about new developments in the field that may help you. Drug development for cancer is a fast-moving research area. The medical literature has articles on new possibilities under development and testing.
Clinical trials
You may be eligible for a clinical trial. Clinical trials test out new drugs, experiment with new treatments, and compare the outcome of existing treatment combinations. There’s no guarantee that a new treatment will help you. But participation in trials helps compile a knowledge-base for future treatments.
Support groups
An estimated 330,000 people are living with bone metastases in the United States.
4. Treatment for secondary breast cancer in the bone
When breast cancer spreads to the bone, it can be treated but cannot be cured.
5. Managing symptoms
There are a number of effective treatments for pain caused by secondary breast cancer in the bone, including pain relief and radiotherapy.
Metastatic breast cancer
Metastatic breast cancer is breast cancer that has spread beyond the breast and nearby lymph nodes to other parts of the body (most often the bones, lungs, liver or brain).
Bone metastases
The bones are one of the most common sites of breast cancer metastases. When metastatic breast cancer spreads to the bones, it’s called bone metastases.
Bone metastases and quality of life
As treatment for metastatic breast cancer improves, so does survival. With people living longer with metastatic breast cancer, it’s even more important to prevent and treat any side effects of bone metastases. These side effects can greatly impact quality of life.
Bone-strengthening drugs for people with bone metastases
Bone metastases can damage your bones. Medications to strengthen and protect your bones (bone-strengthening drugs) reduce this damage and have greatly improved the treatment of bone metastases.
Side effects of bone-strengthening drugs
In some people, bisphosphonates and denosumab can cause joint or muscle pain [ 69 ]. Although they are used to treat bone pain, they can also cause bone pain [ 69 ]. This type of pain usually only last for 1-2 days, and only with the first treatment.
Reducing the pain of bone metastases
Bone-strengthening drugs can reduce pain from bone metastases, but they aren’t the only treatment option for bone pain [ 72 ]. Bone pain should also be treated with standard pain management methods.
Predictions are not exact
Doctors cannot be expected to give an exact prognosis. When a woman is diagnosed as being at an advanced stage of breast cancer, her doctor may tell her that she has mere months to live, but a variety of factors could result in an individual living longer than expected.
Staging
According to a Mayo Clinic website discussing the staging of breast cancer, the staging of breast cancer is a way of measuring how large a breast cancer tumor is and how far the cancer has spread.
Suvivability
According to the U.S. government's National Cancer institute, the survival rate over 5 years for those with localized cancer, that is cancer that has not spread from where it originated, is at 98 percent.
Race factor
Race seems to play a role in the survivability of breast cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, the five year survivability was 90.2 percent for white women and 77.5 percent for black women. Of course, the vast majority of women in both groups were receiving treatment.
A Small Study
A study by Drs. Peter A.S. Johnstone and Marilyn S. Norton, and Robert H. Riffenburgh, PhD., of 250 untreated breast cancer patients found that the median survival time was 2.7 years. They also studied the data on 1,022 untreated patients in other studies, and found a median survival time of 2.3 years.
Regressions are rare
In a few rare cases, women suffering from advanced breast cancer have experienced regressions. According to a CNN report, there are only 32 documented cases of this phenomenon.When speaking of cancer, regression means the size of a tumor has gotten smaller or that the amount of cancer in the body is reduced.
What is breast cancer?
Breast cancer is cancer that starts in the breast. It starts when cells in the breast begin to grow out of control. It can start in one or both breasts.
Are there different kinds of breast cancer?
There are many types of breast cancer. Some are very rare. Your doctor can tell you more about the type you have. Below are the medical names for the most common types of breast cancer. (Carcinoma is another name for cancer.)
How does the doctor know I have breast cancer?
A change seen on your mammogram may be the first sign of breast cancer. Or you may have found a lump or other change in your breast.
How serious is my cancer?
If breast cancer cells are found in your biopsy sample, they will be checked for certain proteins or genes that will help decide how best to treat it.
What will happen after treatment?
You’ll be glad when treatment is over. For years after treatment ends, you will still see your cancer doctor. Be sure to go to all of these follow-up visits. You will have exams, blood tests, and maybe other tests to see if the cancer has come back.
Delays in Surgery or Chemotherapy and Effects on Survival
Lynne Eldrige, MD, is a lung cancer physician, patient advocate, and award-winning author of "Avoiding Cancer One Day at a Time."
Reasons to Wait a Short While
While information suggests having surgery within a few weeks and chemotherapy within a month is ideal, there are some very good reasons why you may wish to wait a few days or a few weeks to begin treatment.
Optimal Wait Time Before Surgery
We lead busy lives. Some people wonder if they can wait until an upcoming vacation to have surgery, or until their children are back in school. Others hope to wait until their insurance kicks in at a new job, or until they are able to find insurance. And not everyone feels quite ready to have surgery right after being diagnosed.
Time to Chemotherapy After Surgery
After surgery for early-stage breast cancer, many women also have adjuvant chemotherapy (and fortunately, genetic testing is helping to define those who need this and those who don't).
Time to Treatment With Metastatic Breast Cancer
There is little research looking at the optimal time until treatment for metastatic breast cancer, though it appears that waiting more than 12 weeks has been linked with lower survival. In general, however, the goal of treatment with MBC is different than early stage disease.
Coping With Waiting
There are times when it can be challenging to schedule your surgery promptly after diagnosis. Some of these include:
Reasons to Refuse Treatment
- Most people would consider it "normal" to want to seek treatment for breast cancer the moment you are diagnosed, particularly at a time where survival rates are ever-increasing. But this would also infer that notseeking treatment is "abnormal," and that's rarely the case. There are a plethora of reasons why a woman may not be willing to pursue or c...
Role of The Physician
- The traditional patriarchal role of the physician has changed vastly in the past 50 or so years. Where doctors were once prescriptive, they are now considered equal partners in your care. When it comes to decisions, however, those are entirely yours. Within this context, the role of your doctor is to provide you full disclosure of your condition and treatment options in a language yo…
Exceptions
- There are few exceptions to your right to refuse medical treatment, however. In an emergency situation, doctors do have the right to intervene only to control the emergency. Unless there is a legal directive to prevent such treatment, such as a Do-Not-Resuscitate (DNR) order, the doctor has an obligation to step in, albeit in a specific capacity. The only other clear exception is parent…
Making An Informed Choice
- Most people have encountered one aspect of informed consent, namely the signing of a medical consent form prior to a medical procedure or hospitalization. But informed consent is about more than just signing a document. It involves discussing the potentials risks and benefits of a recommended treatment, as well as the risks and benefits of receiving no treatment. If, after a re…
If A Loved One Declines Treatment
- If someone you care about has chosen not to continue their cancer treatment, be as supportive as you can. She may have already been met with resistance from her doctors and those closest to her. If her mind is made up, it won't help to add your voice to the debate. If she is still struggling with her decision, offer to listen and help her sort through the options. Ask if she'd like you to joi…